Precursor for making your own cholesterol is Acetyl-CoA which you do get from food like carbs

Eating Vegan? It is Feasible to have sufficient LDL on a vegan diet, but may be harder to have enough for when you need LDL for cell damage repair – just a lot of work to get it right (need enough fat/protein)

Acidity in Gut:

People think making your blood alkaline to kill cancer: NONSENSE

Cancer no longer uses oxygen to make energy, just using glucose and cells make lactic acid, but nothing to do with an acidic environment

This is why starving a cancer cell of glucose it can slow growth or kill it

g. More complex to do this in adults, as it needs to be targeted to specific areas (easier in blood and being done with immune cells that can recognize cancer cells and kill it and then transplant back to humans)

China already experimenting with human In vitro embryos that had already failed (US slower due to regulations needed)

Certain repetitive sequences were found in DNA of bacteria that didn’t belong to the bacteria, it was actual viral

Hypothesis was that DNA was to fight off a virus

Caspase-9is conserved in people, bacteria, viruses and scientists at Berkeley (first published in 2012) figured out to use this to insert specific sites (by cleaving = cutting) much more effectively and successfully than in the past

Old Method: Blast a virus with desired gene at a chromosome and hope it goes somewhere with limited and not very targeted success

New CRISPR Method: Can precisely select where on the chromosome the inserted DNA goes

Implications are very broad and likely significant/maybe scary

Rhonda expects that we can take stem cells, edit them to fix a specific polymorphism and transplant it back into a person (makes sense for diseases/problems with single/known genetic risks/causes – harder for diseases that do not have known genetic causes/risk factors)

We also have the ability to turn all cells into stem cells

Placenta Stem Cells:

Joe has a stem cell injection from a women’s placenta to try needing surgery

Rhonda’s colleague (Frans K.?) found out that placenta’s have more stem cells, much more so than the umbilical chord and able to form almost every cell type (blood, liver, neurons, etc.)

BUT placenta banking is quite rare, but wasn’t aware how you can find matches (Joe found his in Vegas)

Be wary as the viability and quality of the stem cell is likely to vary widely

When trying to recover you should take Vitamin D and marine Omega 3 fatty acids (along with benefits to brain health – such as ADHD, autism, compulsive behavior) –

Serotonin is key for executive function and without it people become very compulsive (Joe finds that he does this when he is exhausted, at this time tryptophan no longer gets to the brain, and more likely to engage in addictive type behavior)

People with polymorphisms that impact serotonin pathways, they are most prone to deficiencies in Vitamin D/Omega 3’s and need them the most